Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Boris Beizer.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
Boris Beizer (1934-2018) was an American software engineer and author. He received his B.S. degree in physics from the City College of New York in 1956, an MS in Electrical Engineering (1963) and a PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966. He wrote many books and articles on topics such as system architecture and software testing. His books Software Testing Techniques and Software System Testing and Quality Assurance are frequently consulted references on the subject. He directed testing for the FAA's Weather Message Switching Center and several other large communications systems. He was a speaker at many testing conferences and was also known for his seminars on testing. He consulted on software testing and quality assurance with many organizations throughout the world.
Software never was perfect and won't get perfect. But is that a license to create garbage? The missing ingredient is our reluctance to quantify quality.
If you can't test it, don't build it. If you don't test it, rip it out.
First law: The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective.
A test that reveals a bug has succeeded, not failed.
In programming, it’s often the buts in the specification that kill you.
If the objective of testing were to prove that a program is free of bugs, then not only would testing be practically impossible, but it would also be theoretically impossible.
A good threat is worth a thousand tests.
One of the saddest sights to me has always been a human at a keyboard doing something by hand that could be automated. It's sad but hilarious.
Extra features were once considered desirable. We now recognize that 'free' features are rarely free. Any increase in generality that does not contribute to reliability, modularity, maintainability, and robustness should be suspected.
Testing proves a programmer’s failure. Debugging is the programmer’s vindication.
More than the act of testing, the act of designing tests is one of the best bug preventers known.
A design remedy that prevents bugs is always preferable to a test method that discovers them.
Second law: The complexity barrier. Software complexity (and therefore that of bugs) grows to the limits of our ability to manage that complexity.
Bugs lurk in corners and congregate at boundaries.